From the author of

From the author of

Editor's Note: This is episode 2 of 8. If you are just jumping in, you might want to start with the transcript of episode 1.

Lee Odden: Welcome to IBM
Press Podcast Series with Mike Moran and Lee Odden. My name is Lee Odden, CEO
of TopRank Online Marketing and Executive Editor of marketingblog.com. TopRank is an
internet marketing consulting agency that provides enterprise, search engine
optimization, social media, and online public relation services for clients
that range from Hewlett-Packard to McKesson. Mike Moran is our guest today, and
the credentials list on Mike Moran is nearly a mile long, including the fact
that he is the author of two very important books, the new Do It Wrong
Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules and Search Engine
Marketing, Inc. Mike Moran is an IBM distinguished engineer with more than
20 years experience in search technology. He led the original search marketing
strategy for IBM.com as well as the integration of the IBM.com’s site search
technologies. Mike worked on IBM’s website for eight years and now works on
IBM’s OmniFind Enterprise Search and Analytics Products. In addition to his
search work, he’s also a columnist for Revenue Magazine and WebProNews. He also writes a very popular blog called
"Biznology," which you can find at mikemoran.com. This is episode 2 of 8
Podcasts. We’ll talk about how the internet opens up new kinds of marketing
offering new opportunities for marketers to reach their target audiences.

LO: So, Mike,
tell me what you mean in the Do It Wrong Quickly book where you
talk about the new marketing communication.

Mike Moran: Well, Lee, I
think that a lot of folks are a little nervous about the internet because they
think that it means that everything that they knew about marketing
communication has gone away, and the truth is that it hasn’t. What’s really
true is that we’re experiencing changes in the way that you communicate with
customers, but a lot of things that you knew are still true. So, it’s still
important to know how to identify your message and to find when it resonates
with your customers. It’s still important to know what your customers’
characteristics are and for you to be able to target segments in your market.
So, all those things are still important. The thing that’s changed is where it
used to be that you were going to interrupt people while they were doing
something else — you’d have a TV commercial come on while they’re watching
a show, or you’d have a magazine ad while reading an article. Now, what’s
happening is that you’re forcing customers to select to hear your message. So,
you have to have something appealing, something attractive, something that you
want them to look at. You’re going to have to have a message that they pick and
that’s different from the way it used to be. So, you need to have something
that they’re going to subscribe to whether it’s an e-mail newsletter or blog.
You’re going to have to have product information that’s relevant to what they
are doing because maybe they’re typing in a search. You’re going to have to
have something that causes them to choose to spend time with your marketing
message. That’s something that’s very different from the way things used to
work.

LO: It’s an
interesting play how push messaging has been an advertising strategy or
marketing strategy for a lot of organizations for many years; and the notion of
pull where customers are self segmenting themselves, let’s say, through search
or their decisions to subscribe to the various channels of information that are
being communicated.

MM: Yeah, that’s really one
of the biggest changes. Now you have the opportunity to reach people right at
their point of need. It used to be that you might be able to pick the right
demographics, but you still had no idea whether the exact people that got to
read your message were interested in it, in that moment. With search for
example, you’re typing in something that tells you exactly what they’re interested
in right then. You can meet them at their point of need. The other thing that’s
really different about the new marketing communications is that you used to be
in a position where you focused on message control. You focused on pushing
messages out there, as you said. You focused on staying on message and making
sure that you had coordination of messages across all your channels. All those
things are not unimportant, but the idea of message control is probably waning
because you’re not going to be able to control what your customers say about
you. That was always true, but what the web does is give to the customer a
megaphone where they get to say the same kinds of things with the same
credibility that you have.

So, web 2.0 especially gives the customer a printing press so they
can comment on your blogs or write their own blogs; they can change your wikis;
they can rate your products and review your offerings. They have all sorts of
ways that they can use the web as a printing press where they can put their
opinion out there just as easily as you can. So, your marketing message doesn’t
dominate the media anymore. It has to share space with customers who were
talking about you as well. And, if you’re really not listening, customers will
go and create a hate site. And that’s something that when somebody searches for
your company name that could be the number three search result. Even though you
spent millions of dollars trying to get your message out there, somebody who
spent very little can put a message out there that might even be more credible
than yours with your customers.

What’s really happening is that it’s not a one way message anymore
where you decide what the message is and you control it to be turned into a
conversation. This is something that years ago the folks who wrote the Cluetrain
Manifesto were on to when they talked about marketing becoming a conversation.
Well, it’s kind of happened now. The reason we are still talking about it is
because now everybody really has to cope with this new reality that marketers
can say whatever they want, just like they always have, but now they’re in a
position where they have to hear what customers say back to them and they have
to respond to it. Sometimes customers are going to criticize them; sometimes they
are going to misunderstand what the marketer said or they’ll be offended by it;
all those kinds of things always happened, but all they could do is tell the
person next door. Now, they can tell millions of people whenever they want and
marketers have to respond to their conversation.

LO: So, now it’s
more of an interaction, and it seems that technology has evolved through
various social media communities and channels that facilitate that type of
interaction. Marketers needed to be aware of that and how to capitalize on it.

MM: Yeah, I think that we
talk a lot about viral marketing these days. All viral marketing is
word-of-mouth on steroids. It’s just the same kind of thing that always
happened, but it’s just exponentially different in terms of the reach that
people have who are talking. I’ve heard somebody refer to it as word-of-
mouse’ and what that’s really saying is: people always have this interest in
telling their story about how they feel about marketing messages or product
experience, but now when they tell it, they can tell it to many, many more
people. They can tell it even more easily than they could before and they can
tell it in much greater depth; so marketers are interested in harnessing that
so that good messages are passed along. They also have to be careful and
respond when there is a bad message being passed along so that they can kind of
dampen down the hysteria that can take over and make up bad stories that run
all over the web.

LO: So, yeah,
it’s just like in chapter 2 of your book where you talk about new wine in old
bottles. It’s really nothing new. What kind of advice would you give to
companies that understand, "I have to be part of this conservation," whether
it’s advertising or public relations or marketing folks? What can they do to do
a better job at listening to their customers, to their market?

MM: I think the first thing
that they can do is to take advantage of technology themselves. Whether it’s a
small company that wants to use something like GoogleAlerts where Google can send
you e-mail that tells you every time your company was mentioned or the name of
your product or the name of an officer of your company, or there are other
high-end reputation monitoring services that can go out and look and harvest
all this information that’s showing up on the web everyday and show it to you
and collate it and give you a dashboard that shows you how many positive
mentions and negative mentions they had of you yesterday. So, all those kind of
technologies are there. There’s technology that allows people to spread
messages better. There’s also technology that can help you keep up with all
that information that’s exploding. The more important thing is what you do
about that. The more important thing is to have an attitude that says we’re going
be in these communities. We’re going to not just do damage control when
something happens, but we’re going to work with all our employees to be out
there on message boards, to be out there commenting on blogs. They’re going to
be out there all the time to help our customers. When something goes wrong and
there is a crisis, your employees are right there as trusted members of that
community. When they have something to say, people will listen to them a lot
differently than they would listen to some PR person who comes parachuting in
with the company line of what it is that the company wants to say. Being part
of that community and really being somebody who’s trusted in that community is
the way that you can really get that kind of leverage.

LO: You know, you
make a fantastic point in the idea that as marketers we need to engage the
communities and be active participants and add value. Because really, it’s only
by adding value that we are going to get value out of these types of platforms
in ways of helping customers.

MM: That’s right. I think
we need to think much more altruistically. When you’re putting stories out
there, you need to think like a newspaper reporter. We need to think about what
are the kinds of things that would help customers, what’s interesting to
customers. That’s how you get them to select your message, and it’s how you’re
relevant. I talk in the book about the three R’s of the new marketing and one
of them is relevance. One of them is you have to make sure that what you are
saying is really relevant to your audience. So that’s why Google will find you
because you have done something that’s relevant to what a searcher is looking
for. That’s why people will link to you because they find the information
you’re offering relevant. That’s how you get the information to spread because
when people want to spread your message, it’s because it’s a relevant message
to a certain group of people. When they’re using social media marketing they
might be using a social book marking like Digg or Delicious. They might be
posting a link on a message board in yahoo groups, or in the kinds of
communities that are formed around social media. You’re going to have people
sharing your message in Facebook. Why are they going to do that? They think
it’s relevant to a group of people that they know. That relevance is really
important, but you also need the other two R’s. One of them is to be real, to
be authentic.

LO: Exactly.

MM: You can’t go out there
and pretend you’re somebody you’re not and start posting things. You don’t want
to have the normal kind of corporate faceless approach to public relations and
press releases. You want to have real human beings out there who admit when
they make mistakes who can help the community because they are people who care.
So, you need that kind of ability to be real.

The last thing you need is to be responsive. When things happen,
you can’t just go into hiding and say, "Well, if we don’t talk about it, the
story will die." The stories never die on the internet. They’re sitting out
there to be searched in Google five years later. So you have to be out there.
You have to engage. You have to be responsive and tell people, "Hey, look if we
screwed up, we screwed up. Here’s what we’re going to do differently. We’re
really sorry about that, and we learned our lesson. Here’s what we’re going to
do." Or, other times you have to say, "Hey, look, that’s really not accurate.
Here’s our side of the story. Here’s what we really think." You have to trust
that if people are denigrating you unfairly, and you’re somebody who has a high
degree of ethics and you show that you are committed to your side of the story,
that you really do try to listen and help and fix things every possible way.
But if the other people who are talking against you are unreasonable, well,
then you have to expect that the people watching this dialogue are going to
understand that and they’re going to give you credit for that. They’ll know if the people who are
talking against you are all nuts and you have to understand that people are
going to recognize that. In fact, one thing that happens is that people who
don’t work for your company will kind of dive into these conversations and say,
"Leave them alone, they’re doing fine, you’re being unreasonable, and you’re
not listening. No matter what they do you don’t seem pay any attention." So
they’re going to tamp down their conversation because you have people who are
in that community and trusted and who are being real and relevant. That’s
what’s going to cause them to help respond on your behalf.

LO:Exactly. The active participation in communities is sowing the seeds
for future brand evangelists.

LO: Well, great, this is
just fantastic, Mike. This concludes our second of eight Podcasts. Our next
Podcast is going to talk about that new-fangled direct marketing where we’ll
find out what all those people stuffing your mailbox know about direct
marketing. For more information on Mike Moran as well as the two books, Do It Wrong
Quickly and
Search Engine Marketing, Inc.,
please visit mikemoran.com. This series
is brought to you by IBM Press at IBMpressbooks.com.